Let's all take a breath. In through the nose and out through the mouth. Breathe. Repeat. Without the daily full team meetings, and the new schedule that has teachers teaching five periods a day, I sense that many of you are uncomfortable. The dis-ease of the staff is almost palpable.
Right now what we need to do is to model what we want our students to do. We always want our students to see their learning holistically and not as isolated knowledge. We want them to be able to globalize their learning and to be able to apply it in new situations.
We have more than 540 years of teaching experience. We only have three weeks of experience with this new schedule and these new students. What we need to do is to globalize our experience to meet these new challenges. What we must avoid at all costs is what Daniel Kahneman calls heuristic judgment. (2011) According to Kahneman, when a person or organization has a problem that they don't know how to solve, they turn it into a problem they can solve. Put another way, if you view every problem as a nail, the only tool you ever need is a hammer. Our challenge is to have the discipline to collaboratively find new solutions to new problems.
We need to keep the reasons why we are doing this fresh in our minds at all times. The only way to ensure our students can achieve at high levels is to increase the amount of instructional minutes and their opportunity to learn. Let's face it, teaching five periods a day is much more stressful than teaching four periods and workshop block. Add to that change having to teach in two grade levels, and for some people, teaching multiple content areas in two grade levels. That much change without the stability and comfort of a daily team meetings creates even more stress. It's a significant adjustment, but it is absolutely the right thing to do for our students.
For far too long the annual apples and oranges comparisons between Pawcatuck Middle, a Title I School, and that other middle school has discounted the great work we do here. My personal goal is to have a school where demographics doesn’t equal destiny, and right now we are on the cusp of greatness.
For the first time, three out of four grade levels either met or exceeded the scores for English Language Arts of that other middle school in our region. That is awesome. Let me say that another way -- Pawcatuck Middle School’s ELA achievement led the district for half of all students in the district’s middle schools. Perhaps even better than that, the gap between the two middle school’s students scoring at the highest level was closer than it ever has been before. Even in grade 8 ELA, where the overall gap at level 3 and above was 6 points lower than district average, we only missed district average at level 4 by 3 points. Three percentage points for that cohort of students is only two students. Two. We are making good progress in math too. Our seventh grade led the district in math by a wide margin. Even in eighth grade, where some of the numbers didn’t match up well, 31 percent of our students achieved level 3, which was right on district average.
That's quite an accomplishment for a Title I school. We know what our obstacles and challenges are with our demographics. For our teachers to achieve these results is nothing short of outstanding. It's one of the many reasons why I don't want to work in any other middle school. We do good work here, and we achieve results while taking really good care of our students.
We need to look at all of our problems and solve them creatively and keep moving forward by increasing opportunity to learn and protecting instructional minutes every opportunity we get.
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